C41 Precooked Lamb
Precooking lamb is an essential part of making restaurant style (BIR) curries as the meat requires a lengthy cooking time in order to become tender enough.
Ingredients
| 3 portions |
Continued... |
| 4 tbspn oil |
½ tspn ground cinnamon |
| 100 gm onion (prepared weight) |
½ tspn salt |
| 10 gm ginger |
2 cloves |
| 10 gm garlic |
4 green cardamom pods |
| ½ tspn ground cumin |
2 tspn tomato purée |
| ½ tspn ground coriander |
500 gm boneless leg lamb steaks |
Preparation
- Chop the onion.
- Chop the ginger.
- Chop the garlic.
- Deseed the cardamom pods and roughly crush the seeds and the 2 cloves to a powder in a pestle and mortar.
- Remove the fat from the lamb and cut into approx 1 inch cubes.
Cooking
- Heat the oil in a flame proof casserole and cook the onions for 3 min.
- Add the ginger and garlic and cook, stirring, for 1 min.
- Add the cumin, coriander, cinnamon, salt, cloves and cardamom and cook, stirring, for 1 min.
- Stir in tomato purée.
- Add the lamb and cook, stirring frequently, for 5 min to seal and brown the meat.
- Add hot water to cover (maybe 250 ml) and simmer, covered, for 30 min, stirring occasionally.
- Uncover and increase the heat and continue to cook for 30 min, stirring regularly (different cuts of lamb will need cooking for different times, so cook until tender - this will be when the lamb can be easily cut into pieces with a chef's spoon). The idea is to reduce the liquid until almost dry although some oil will remain.
Notes
A 500 gm pack of lamb will eventually produce about 300 - 350 gm of cooked lamb and this can be split into 3 even portions and either refrigerated for a few days or frozen for future use.
At the time of writing a 500 gm pack of boneless leg lamb steaks from ASDA costs £5.00.